Let's play with Jekyll themes

Apr 25, 2017

Jekyll has a robust, well-designed theming system, on par with the likes of Ruby on Rails, Wordpress, or Django. With some HTML skills, Jekyll themes aren’t too hard to adapt from free or even professionally-designed themes, readily available on the web. They’re also simple enough to roll your own.

That’s great, since Jekyll ships with a very simple theme called minima, which might be too minimal. In this exercise, we’re going to gussy it up.

You’ll want to start with a fresh Jekyll installation; perhaps get up to speed using this Jekyll tutorial. Start by entering your Jekyll project’s directory in your terminal.

cd ~/Documents/jekyll_app

… or wherever your new project lives.

Modifying the standard Minima theme

minima is a “Gem-based theme”, i.e. Jekyll’s new style of theme packaging. This means it uses Ruby’s native packaging system for distribution, providing (in theory) seamless installation and updating of themes. [In practice things can get more complicated, but for simple tasks, the Gem system works well.]

You can modify the standard minima theme in place, without altering its code, to make small, discrete edits. This is done by duplicating minima files into your own Jekyll site, to then override minima’s own files.

To see the minima files which might be overridden, consult it directly:

bundle show minima

This shows the directory where minima’s files are kept. Let’s take a peek in there; you can either locate the folder in the Mac Finder/Windows Explorer, or just open it directly in your text editor. Here’s how I do it with Sublime Text):

subl $(bundle show minima)

Inside are several files which might be useful to override:

_includes # includes are "partials": little snippets of code, small components, meant for reuse
_layouts # layouts are full page structures, which you can nest within other layouts
_sass # Sass is like super CSS

In this case, we’ll just alter a few Sass variables to see how it works. In practice, however, you can overload any of these files to your heart’s content, safe in the knowledge that you’re not actually changing the Gem files, so your changes can’t hurt anything. This really provides a lot of creative freedom.

To start, duplicate the primary minima Sass file into your project.

mkdir _sass
cp $(bundle show minima)/_sass/minima.scss _sass/

A file named minima.scss should now be in the new _sass directory you just created. This file is minima’s primary set of base default styles, stuffed with variables which we can alter however we like. It is consulted whenever your Jekyll site is rebuilt, and is compiled automatically into browser-safe CSS.

Sass is like super CSS: it provides a lot of fancy features to CSS, like variables and module imports, which CSS doesn’t support. It is a strict superset of CSS, however, so all CSS is valid Sass. Note the file extension: Sass uses the scss extension these days, mostly for historical reasons.

To demonstrate possible changes you can perform, near the top of this file, change this line…

…which, when you reload your site with jekyll serve should change how your base font gets rendered. Then, so our headings aren’t all in Serif fonts, lets change them back to Helvetica, by placing this CSS code at the bottom of this file, below the @import directives:

So, really you can change any CSS for your entire site from this file, or import other Sass files to do more drastic changes.

Installing a Rubygems-based theme

As of version 3.2, themes can be installed via “Rubygems”: Ruby’s package manager system. This is the newest, cleanest method, minimizing the need to write or maintain code in the future. Gem-installed themes can be modified in the same way as we modified minima in the preceding section.

That’s all true “in theory”. In practice, the Gem-based theme system is quite new, and has a few teething problems. There also just aren’t many Gem themes available, at least in comparison to the number of older, so-called “classic” themes.

Installation of a Gem-based theme is straightforward. In the interest of simplicity, we’ll install a theme largely compatible with the standard Jekyll setup, using posts and pages like minima does, called Jekyll Swiss.

Update your Gemfile to include jekyll-swiss, by adding jekyll-swiss…

gem"minima","~> 2.0"gem"jekyll-swiss"# <-- new

(For now, we’re going to keep minima in there, because of a silly bug.)

Update your _config.yml by changing this line…

theme: "minima", "~> 2.0"

…to this:

theme: "jekyll-swiss"

Then we need Bundler to take note of these changes:

bundle install
bundle update

…which will install Jekyll Swiss for us.

At this point, we should be able to simply run…

jekyll serve

…but on my machine, however, Jekyll complains that it can’t find some Github Pages-related files. Let’s copy them from the Minima gem (first creating the necessary container directories):

Now we can remove gem "minima", "~> 2.0" from our Gemfile, and boot up our site, with its snazzy new theme.

open http://localost:4000/

Whew; a little bit of ugliness there. While this particular bug is related to GitHub pages in particular, it underlines how Gem themes are still crusty around the edges. When they finally get mature, they’ll be great.